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Never mind the personal feelings of people, which they're entitled to have, over the notion of a mosque being built in close proximity to Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan. Those sensitivities have nothing to do with what's really going on. It's really all about President Barack Obama and his political opponents according to New York Times columnist Frank Rich. On MSNBC's Aug. 26 broadcast of "The Rachel Maddow Show," host Rachel Maddow admitted she was befuddle that anti-Islam sentiment has seemingly peaked in the past few weeks and wondered why it has suddenly been brought to boil, with the mosque...

Never mind the personal feelings of people, which they're entitled to have, over the notion of a mosque being built in close proximity to Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan. Those sensitivities have nothing to do with what's really going on. It's really all about President Barack Obama and his political opponents according to New York Times columnist Frank Rich. On MSNBC's Aug. 26 broadcast of "The Rachel Maddow Show," host Rachel Maddow admitted she was befuddle that anti-Islam sentiment has seemingly peaked in the past few weeks and wondered why it has suddenly been brought to boil, with the mosque...

Margaret Dumont whose best-known character was as Mrs. Teasdale in the Marx Brothers movies; Chatsworth Osborne Jr.; of the Dobie Gillis show; Richie Rich of comic-strip fame; the Howells of Gilligan’s Island; and countless others. They're stock characters in American culture. Rich, society people who speak with exaggerated accents, look down their noses at the masses, and take their privileges as being due to their superior virtue. This is a particularly American response to class difference: laughing at these pretenses. Communist cartoons portrayed fat, top-hatted plutocrats in hope of stirring a proletarian revolution against privilege; Americans ridiculed its pretensions. Yet...

Last week, I attacked Frank Rich's nonsense article about race and the Tea Parties, in which he prosaically (and not-at-all-like those heavy-breathers on the right) compared recent health care protests to a famous Nazi pogrom that presaged the Holocaust. It's always helpful when demonizing your opponent to invoke Nazism—they are that bad—but Rich's real message was embedded in his headline: The rage is not about health care. And I suspect I won't spoil the ending if I reveal that health care protesters are collectively motivated by race hatred. Yesterday he revisited the issue, sharing an email from one of his...

Homeland Security: Forget about foreign jihadists getting nukes or planting bombs in their underwear. The real enemies, some say, are domestic militia groups who play at war and those nasty Tea Party racists. The raid on a Michigan militia group accused of plotting war against the government will no doubt feed into the arguments of those who claim in the wake of health reform that the vast right-wing conspiracy is not only angry, but armed and dangerous. According to an Associated Press report, "Authorities said the arrests underscored the dangers of homegrown right-wing extremism of the sort seen in the...

Did Frank Rich read Charles Blow's column and sub-consciously subsume it? Rich's NY Times opus of March 27 is a virtual echo of Blow's item of March 26. Coincidence or not, the two Timesmen are very much on the same wavelength. Their shared theory: conservative opposition to Obamacare is fueled not so much by the substance of PBO's plans as it is by the racism, homophobia and sexism of people who can't bear to witness America's changing demographics. Compare the eerie similarities in the two columns:

.... Obama may well make — or is already making — his own mistakes. And he will bear responsibility for them. But they must be seen in the context of the larger narrative that the revisionists are now working so hard to obscure. The most devastating terrorist attack on American soil did happen during Bush’s term, after the White House repeatedly ignored what the former C.I.A. director, George Tenet, called the “blinking red” alarms before 9/11. It was the Bush defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, who lost bin Laden in Tora Bora, not the Obama Justice Department appointees vilified by Keep...

In a recent New York Times column, Frank Rich attacked and smeared the nascent tea party movement. While most of his diatribe received the fiskings it deserved, one significant fallacy went unchallenged. Perhaps it was overlooked because the left has committed it for so long now that it seems unquestionable. All the more reason to bring it to light. Read more: http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/force-and-violence-how-the-left-blurs-terms/

Talk about tough love . . . Frank Rich believes Barack Obama is approaching a "do or die moment" and that "we face the alarming prospect that his presidency could be toast" if he doesn't push ObamaCare through. Rich's New York Times column of today, The Up-or-Down Vote on Obama’s Presidency, is a crushing compendium of criticism for a president he sees as talented but too timid. I'd encourage readers to read the full piece, but let's have fun with this super-condensed version of Frank's frustration-venting:

WEDNESDAY'S health care rally was one of President Obama's finest hours. It was so fine it couldn't be blighted even by his preposterous backdrop, a cohort of white-jacketed medical workers large enough to staff a hospital in one of the daytime soaps that refused to be pre-empted by the White House show. At last he mobilized his rhetoric against a villain everyone could hiss - insurance companies. In a brief address, he mentioned these malefactors of great greed 13 times.

No one knows what history will make of the present — least of all journalists, who can at best write history’s sloppy first draft. But if I were to place an incautious bet on which political event will prove the most significant of February 2010, I wouldn’t choose the kabuki health care summit that generated all the ink and 24/7 cable chatter in Washington. I’d put my money instead on the murder-suicide of Andrew Joseph Stack III, the tax protester who flew a plane into an office building housing Internal Revenue Service employees in Austin, Tex., on Feb. 18. It...

If one had to read one columnist to appreciate the state of contemporary left-wing commentary, my nomination would be Frank Rich of the Sunday New York Times. No well-known leftist columnist better exemplifies the worst aspects of today’s left. Virtually every piece is filled with anger, filled with ad hominem responses to arguments, filled with insults of opponents and at the same time devoid of intellectual arguments. A Frank Rich column is essentially a weekly tantrum meant to make his readers nod in agreement and reinforce their contempt for those who differ with them. I offer this past Sunday’s column...

If one had to read one columnist to appreciate the state of contemporary left-wing commentary, my nomination would be Frank Rich of the Sunday New York Times. No well-known leftist columnist better exemplifies the worst aspects of today's left. Virtually every piece is filled with anger, filled with ad hominem responses to arguments, filled with insults of opponents and at the same time devoid of intellectual arguments. A Frank Rich column is essentially a weekly tantrum meant to make his readers nod in agreement and reinforce their contempt for those who differ with them. I offer this past Sunday's column...

going to collapse if we don't pass this Democrat slush fund called the "stimulus bill" tomorrow, the world is going to boil over in 3 months unless we turn our lives upside-down to stop global warming, our "moral standing" in the world is being damaged by Republican strategies in the war on terror, black churches are going to burn because America is a racist country, and millions of Americans are going to go poor and starving unless government does something to regulate those greedy corporate executives. These, according to Frank Rich — who according to his own writings agrees wholeheartedly...

On November 22, Frank Rich had this to say about the attendees of Sarah Palin book signings [via TimesWatch]: “That demographic is white and non-urban: Just look at the stops and the faces on her carefully calibrated book tour. The affect is emotional — the angry air of grievance that emerged first at her campaign rallies in 2008, with their shrieked threats to Obama, and that has since resurfaced in the Hitler-fixated ‘tea party’ movement (which she endorses in her book)....Palin is at the red-hot center of age-old American resentments that have boiled up both from the ascent of our...

Has the left finally a reason to be impassioned by a threat to our national security? Michaele and Tareq Salahi seem to have provided that reason. After the Salahis literally crashed a White House State Dinner on Nov. 24, the two demonstrated how vulnerable President Barack Obama could be to outside intruders. And justifiably, it has not only caused some concern with members of Congress, but some of the more outspoken members in the media. On the Fox Business Channel's Nov. 30 "Imus in the Morning" program, host Don Imus conveyed this concern, suggesting it exposed potential weaknesses in the...

AT last the American right and left have one issue they unequivocally agree on: You don’t actually have to read Sarah Palin’s book to have an opinion about it. Last Sunday Liz Cheney praised “Going Rogue” as “well-written” on Fox News even though, by her own account, she had sampled only “parts” of it. On Tuesday, Ana Marie Cox, a correspondent for Air America, belittled the book in The Washington Post while confessing that she couldn’t claim to have “completely” read it. “Going Rogue” will hardly be the first best seller embraced by millions for talismanic rather than literary ends....

THE dead at Fort Hood had not even been laid to rest when their massacre became yet another political battle cry for the self-proclaimed patriots of the American right. Their verdict was unambiguous: Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, an American-born psychiatrist of Palestinian parentage who sent e-mail to a radical imam, was a terrorist. And he did not act alone. His co-conspirators included our military brass, the Defense Department, the F.B.I., the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, the Joint Terrorism Task Force and, of course, the liberal media and the Obama administration. All these institutions had failed to heed the warning...

Frank Rich: Only Stalinists Use Words Like "Stalinist" One of Jesse Walker's most interesting observations in his already-classic October piece on "The Paranoid Center" is that, in a direct inversion of Richard Hofstadter's theory, the establishmentarians who try to scare us about the terribly dangerous fringe end up aping the tactics and even language of the people they so loathe. New York Times columnist Frank Rich, whose commentary about the political right this year has been among the very stupidest in a remarkably dull-witted season, manages to go one step further: In an op-ed on New York's Dictrict 23 congressional...

On his radio show today, Mark levin responded to op-ed columnist Frank Rich's hit piece on Governor Palin that was published in the New York Times yesterday. Take a listen: